The subject matter discussed in the background section should not be assumed to be prior art merely as a result of its mention in the background section. Similarly, a problem mentioned in the background section or associated with the subject matter of the background section should not be assumed to have been previously recognized in the prior art. The subject matter in the background section merely represents different approaches, which in and of themselves may also be inventions.
Social networking has become a progressively more popular form of communication over the years. Users are able to broadcast messages to a wide audience, as well as direct specific messages to a targeted individual or group of individuals across the many different social networking platforms. Within the many social networking platforms, the use of mentions has become more prevalent. A mention is an online social network update that contains a user identifier anywhere in the body of the update. For example, if Ann, a Twitter® account user, tweets a message that she is “looking forward to a meeting with @Bob and @Chris,” the users corresponding to the @Bob and @Chris user identifiers are notified of the tweet via the mentions tab for their respective Twitter® accounts. During the composition of these types of messages, an auto-complete application may be used to prompt a user to select from an auto-populated list of user identifiers that correspond to the already-entered characters.
The auto-complete application helps facilitate the process of entering a mention by not requiring the user to enter the full user identifier. The auto-populated list may include recently entered user identifiers, or all user identifiers from a contacts list, that match the characters already entered. Most auto-complete applications executing on a client side user system submit requests to retrieve lists of user identifiers from the server, and do so for each character that the user inputs. For example, if a user types the five characters for “steve,” the auto-complete application executing on the client side user system makes five separate network requests to the server—the first for a list corresponding to “s”, the second for “st”, the third for “ste”, and so on. Network requests can be slow, especially on mobile devices. Some auto-complete applications use an optimization process where they query the server after an idle delay. For example, if a user types “stev” and then pauses, the network request would be made only after the pause, e.g., 800 milliseconds. Accordingly, it is desirable to provide a technique that provides offline prompts of user identifiers for auto-completing mentions in a social networking application.